Mercury poisoning and fire gilding: the science of S-Town

If you haven’t listened to S-Town, one of the best podcasts of 2017, I need to address two points. First, what have you been doing all year? Second, you might want to stop reading this article now.

Taking the listener on a journey from murder mystery and small-town corruption to a treasure hunt that ends as a portrait of one fascinating man’s life, the hit podcast brings so many things to the audience.

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Through all of its twists, S-Town is all about science, and at WIRED we wanted to delve a little deeper.

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Why is key character John B McLemore so concerned about climate change? Why does nobody else care as much? What even is fire gilding? What is mercury poisoning and did he actually have it?

John's climate change obsession

As S-Town's narrator Brian Reed said during an appearance on the Longform Podcast, if McLemore had survived to listen to S-Town, he would have rather it was just three full episodes about climate change.

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During the entire podcast, McLemore constantly reminds us of the doom our planet is heading for. He quotes figures that serve to fuel his pessimistic outlook on the world, and he says it to anyone who will listen.

“John comes around the tattoo parlour pretty often and likes to lecture them and give them a hard time,” Reed says during the second episode. “He’ll argue with them about their views on the south, on politics, on race. Bubba says he’ll submit them to tirades about the coming climate and energy apocalypses.”

Some of what he says is undoubtedly true. In one of the episodes, Reed rigorously fact-checks the information McLemore has sent him, finding it all adds up.

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Some of what he says in passing is an exaggeration, though. For example, “the whole goddamned Arctic summer sea ice is gonna be gone by 2017”. While it is true that Arctic sea ice has been setting grim new record lows for the past two years, it is not completely gone. In March this year, at its biggest point, Arctic sea ice covered 5.57 million square miles (14.42 million square kilometres). This is 37,000 square miles (97,00 square kilometres) below the previous record low. At its minimum, which it reaches in early September, it was 4.64 million square kilometres, the eighth lowest in the 38 years of record keeping.

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This aside, the facts are there; climate change is real. But why does the prospect of it affect McLemore more than most?

“I sometimes call it toxic knowledge,” says Richard Heinberg, senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, on which McLemore was a regular commenter. “Once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it, and your every subsequent thought is tinted.”

McLemore felt the situation was so bad there was nothing he could do about it. We might not all be as doomed as he says. “In John’s case, hopes for enhanced survival prospects failed to bear fruit,” says Heinberg, “though his story may perhaps inspire some podcast listeners to explore his sources of information and respond in a more pro-social fashion.”

Towards the end of the podcast, it is implied that McLemore’s negative outlook on life is related to the fact he may have suffered from mercury poisoning. This is something hardly anyone is exposed to these days, but a strange hobby McLemore keeps up, in spite of its dangers, leaves him at a very high risk.

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Fire gilding

Fire gilding was invented in the 4th century BC, as a way to transfer gold or silver onto another object. The chemistry behind the technique is simple.

One of the properties that makes the toxic element mercury stand out is that it is in a liquid state when at room temperature. To melt gold or silver it takes huge amounts of heat – you need to reach over 1,000C for gold and 962C for silver. But, when these metals are added to mercury, they dissolve.

Instead of a runny liquid, the mixture of gold and mercury becomes more viscous, with a consistency similar to butter. If you dip something into this mixture then heat it up to mercury’s boiling point, 357C, you melt away the mercury and are left with just silver or gold.

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Mercury poisoning

Fire gilding is banned in a lot of countries, because it is incredibly dangerous. Mercury is released into the atmosphere during the process, and mercury is a neurotoxin.

Mercury poisoning, or mad hatter’s disease, first came to light during the 19th century when hat makers used mercury to transform animal skin into felt, for top hats. Many hat makers developed erethism mercurialis, a form of chronic neurological mercury poisoning that affects the entire nervous system. Some of the symptoms of erethism are tremors, nervousness, and insomnia.

“There may be an insidious change in mood to shyness, withdrawal, and depression along with explosive anger or blushing,” said Dr Michael Kosnett of the Colorado School of Public Health in a book on clinical pharmacology. This sounds like McLemore.

“I do not have a definitive answer as to whether or not John had mercury poisoning and if that could have been a force behind some of his behaviour, his personality, and even his suicide,” said Reed.

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However, it is a definite possibility. “He was doing it for years, so the quantity of mercury in his workshop must have been unbelievable,” professor Jack Caravanos, the mercury-poisoning expert from NYU featured on S-Town, told Vox. “So that’s why his health effects, I think, are completely plausible.”

However, even if he was suffering from mercury poisoning, there were no real treatment options open to him. The nerves would have already been damaged.

Brian Reed will be on tour in the UK this weekend with his show 'Brian Reed on Creating S-Town', which will explain how the podcast was made.